{"id":257438540,"date":"2013-02-27T14:42:20","date_gmt":"2013-02-27T14:42:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp.baltimorespokes.org\/?p=257438540"},"modified":"2013-02-27T14:42:20","modified_gmt":"2013-02-27T14:42:20","slug":"with-rapid-response-grant-waba-improves-police-enforcement-for-bicyclists-in-dc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.baltimorespokes.org\/?p=257438540","title":{"rendered":"With Rapid Response Grant, WABA Improves Police Enforcement for Bicyclists in DC"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>By Mary Lauran Hall, Alliance for Biking and Walking<br \/>\n&#8230;<br \/>\nWhat should advocates do when bicyclists are consistently incorrectly cited by local police? The Washington Area Bicyclist Association has a pretty good answer.<br \/>\nFor the past several years, Shane Farthing, WABA\u2019s executive director, had been aware of a disturbing pattern. Advocates consistently heard accounts from bicyclists who had been injured in crashes and had received citations that just didn\u2019t make sense from Metropolitan Police Department officers. Many said they had been fined for breaking a law that was not applicable to the incident. In some cases, officers had assigned blame to an injured cyclist based only on a driver\u2019s statement, without actually interviewing the bicyclist or witnesses. Some had even been cited for violating laws that did not exist.<br \/>\nThese accounts led Shane and his employees to believe that MPD officers were not receiving adequate training on enforcing laws pertinent to bicyclists. In response, WABA launched a campaign \u201cto advocate for and secure funding for the holistic training of MPD officers of the application of the law to bicyclists.\u201d<br \/>\nThe enforcement campaign kicked off in February of 2011, when WABA requested and received a DC Council Committee on the Judiciary hearing to assess MPD\u2019s enforcement of laws pertaining to bicyclists. In response to the advocates\u2019 testimony, the DC Office of Police Complaints issued a report confirming poor work by the Police Department. The report prompted several councilmembers and staffers to request that WABA provide better documentation of the types of incidents cyclists described in testimony.<br \/>\n&#8230;<br \/>\nDespite egregious errors, the police department did not indicate willingness to make meaningful changes.<br \/>\n\u201cEvery time we would go to testify, the MPD would say that they already had these trainings in place and there was no problem,\u201d said Shane. \u201cWe were in a he-said-she-said situation.\u201d<br \/>\nWABA\u2019s biggest challenge was furnishing solid evidence. \u201cThe limitation we faced at every stage was a lack of data,\u201d Shane recalled. \u201cOur crash tracker had a small sample size.\u201d<br \/>\n\u201cSo we decided to put together good FOIA requests to analyze these crash reports.\u201d Using the Freedom of Information Act, WABA would obtain the actual police reports that were relevant to the trends advocates had spotted in Crash Tracker responses.<br \/>\n&#8230;<br \/>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/www.peoplepoweredmovement.org\/site\/index.php\/site\/blog\/4354\/\">https:\/\/www.peoplepoweredmovement.org\/site\/index.php\/site\/blog\/4354\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Mary Lauran Hall, Alliance for Biking and Walking &#8230; What should advocates do when bicyclists are consistently incorrectly cited by local police? The Washington Area Bicyclist Association has a pretty good answer. For the past several years, Shane Farthing, WABA\u2019s executive director, had been aware of a disturbing pattern. Advocates consistently heard accounts from &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/wp.baltimorespokes.org\/?p=257438540\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;With Rapid Response Grant, WABA Improves Police Enforcement for Bicyclists in DC&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-257438540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biking-elsewhere"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.baltimorespokes.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257438540","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.baltimorespokes.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.baltimorespokes.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.baltimorespokes.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.baltimorespokes.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=257438540"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wp.baltimorespokes.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257438540\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.baltimorespokes.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=257438540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.baltimorespokes.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=257438540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.baltimorespokes.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=257438540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}